Creative Round Table: Christine Nolfi, Roz Morris, David Penny

Short-form audio is becoming a meaningful new outlet for authors. As listening habits shift—and as tools for production become more accessible through human and AI narration—short audiobooks are gaining ground with both readers and platforms. From Spotify’s recent launch of a short-form program for independent authors to new experiments among ALLi members, this format is quickly finding its place in the indie publishing toolkit.

In this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi Member Q&A podcast, host Michael La Ronn discusses whether it's worth hiring a marketing company to promote your second book—and why many authors might be better off learning to market themselves first.

We end the week with a round-up that begins with a story I seem to have missed when it first broke at the start of April. It’s an interesting and highly relevant twist in the TikTok ownership saga. You will recall that we are currently in a ninety-day extension to the time at which the TikTok ban is scheduled to come into force. The condition for avoiding the ban is that TikTok in the US is sold to a company not based in China and uses a different algorithm from the one the ByteDance-owned company currently operates everywhere it is available.